In this first weeks of class, I had finally saved enough money to go get a new Galaxy S4. I was so excited. When I went and bought my phone there was a new app that they promote called ISIS. When you downloaded the app were given $25.00 as a promotion for their new mobile payment app. Shortly after that the terrorist group ISIS was all over the news. I remember thinking what a complete "nightmare" for the PR representatives. This is something they couldn't possibly have accounted for. What terrible timing!!! They were forced to re-brand their app, it is now SoftCard. There is a firm in the UK who had the same issue. They were forced to rename their company after the name ISIS became associated with the terrorist group.
I never really thought about some of the information you brought up. The companies probably took quite a bit of time and effort to come up with their brand to just have it ruined like that. That would be very unfortunate to happen, especially if your company has been around a long time. The rebranding process would be much more difficult and take more time to restructure the company to the level it was at. I like you mentioned they couldn’t have possibly prepared for this. I agree, there isn’t really anything they could have done to prevent this. Great post.
ReplyDeleteWhile I read this article, it reminded me of some hacking issues happened in Korea by hackers. One of the victims was 'N' bank. Hackers successfully accessed to the system which has all customers' information including their social security numbers. What hackers did this for was to make money by selling the customers' information to people who want those information for their illegal business. What the PR practitioners of 'N' bank did was mainly sending an apology letter to all customers and posting the letter on its website by saying that they would do better job for customers and prevent anyone's information from hacking. No matter how the PR practitioners did great or bad job, as I live in the United States, I have totally forgotten about this issue and didn't realize it was one of things what PR practitioners do. Great post to remind me of past experience and to expend my knowledge of PR!
ReplyDeleteThat does sound like the worst case scenario for an up and coming company! It’s hard enough to launch an app and make it successful, but when something like that comes up it makes it near impossible to keep up the image you are trying to create for a company. It looks like they handled it all very well as they could have failed miserably if they kept their name.
ReplyDeleteThat's very interesting that you bring this topic up. I never heard of this controversy happen but I'm glad I read your post. Judging from a PR perspective I think the company did the right thing in re-branding its company. It is pretty hard to re promote the same idea when you had already enticed a market to use your product. I know this from experience as something similar happened to me a few years ago only not to the same extent as ISIS. The PR consultants would again have to gain the trust of the consumer and persuade the consumer that this issue wouldn't happen again. I think they had no choice but to re-brand its product, otherwise they may have never seen the light of day again with ISIS. I enjoyed learning about this as its new news to me.
ReplyDeleteI was hoping that someone would choose this topic! I thought of it shortly after I submitted my post. I was in a Verizon store not too long ago and saw that they still had ISIS products for sale. I understand that it was just bad timing but I thought there might be a few people that don't get it and would be terribly offended. I would've assumed that all products with the ISIS name on them would be removed from shelves immediately.
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